


Nobody Knows What The Future Holds (Except For Foggy Nelson)

by eveningfoxes



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Angst, Character Death, Foggy and Jack are bros, Foggy is just trying his best okay, Gen, Grief, Grieving, Mentions of child abuse because Stick, So much angst, Swearing, Time Travel, angst like you would not believe, but seriously there is major angst, if you were looking for a happy ending you came to the WRONG place, terminal illness, vague implications of suicide, what do you mean there's such thing as editing my work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-27
Updated: 2016-05-29
Packaged: 2018-07-10 13:21:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 12,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6986740
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eveningfoxes/pseuds/eveningfoxes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Matt Murdock dies in 2013, Foggy Nelson wakes up in 1992 and tries to stop the inevitable path that leads to Matt becoming Daredevil. It's much harder than Back to The Future made it out to be.</p>
<p>-<br/>“Alright.” Foggy sighs melodramatically. “Fine. You want to play it the hard way, do you?” Because Foggy’s brain is fucked up at the moment (that’s what he’s blaming it on, it’s grief, alright? He’s not usually this dumb, because he’s watched hundreds of sci-fi time travel movies and he knows that the worst thing to do is expose yourself as a time traveller, but give him a break, alright?), he says “Guess you don’t want to talk to the time traveller that just watched your son die because he’s a fucking self-sacrificing idiot.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part 1

**Author's Note:**

> Just a few cautionary warnings; Matt dies from being shot too many times and there's the obvious aftermath of Foggy dealing with the grief, also some swearing and an emotional rollercoaster ride. There's also some implications at child abuse because Stick. It's great fun.

Foggy wakes up the day after his best friend dies in someone else's bed. It's not Marcis bed, because it doesn't have silk sheets worth more than two months of Foggy life savings, and it's not Karens because she had these endearingly cute sheers with one of the ponies from My Little Pony on there (Rainbowdash maybe?) that Foggy had always given her a hard time about. His brain is muddled, moving through sludge slowly. He thinks that maybe he should care that he's in a strange bed in a strange apartment. 

He doesn't though. 

He doesn't because Matt is dead. 

He doesn't because Matt had bled out underneath his shaking hands and Claire's experienced ones, gasping and choking up blood because his new, special reinforced suit that he had promised would stop bullets had failed to stop bullets.

And at the memory of the blood covering his hands, the way he felt Matt’s chest stutter - once, twice, a third time and then falling and never rising again - his eyes start to burn. He didn’t think it was possible to cry anymore than he already had, because he had screamed at Matt and cried and begged for Claire to fix everything.

But Claire had shook her head, tears streaming down her face. 

Because Matt is dead.

Was it even worth getting up if Matt was gone? So maybe he had cut ties with the man and had made the unsteady table of Nelson and Murdock into the crumbled remains of Murdock, but it didn’t mean he had wanted him dead - he had hoped that maybe one day they could reconcile as old men and hang out in their nursing home together, yelling at kids to get off of the lawn and Foggy would lose his eyesight and Matt would laugh at him and -

Fuck, he might actually throw up.

He forces himself up (“It won’t do you any good to stay in bed all day, Foggy, get some sunshine.” His mother tells him lovingly, an affectionate eyeroll hidden beneath those words, and fuck fuck fuck fuck, he has to tell his mother that her adopted baby is dead) because he has to actually live and breathe like a normal fucking human being and call Karen and pretend like everything is okay. 

It’s really not okay.

Because Matt is dead.

Because Matt had been his first real friend who hadn’t made fun of Foggy’s pudge (“Nelson, don’t be offended, it was jus’ a joke, no harm meant man.”) or his name (“What kind of lawyer has the name Foggy? You’re pathetic and you have no chance.”) and had filled him with ideas of grandeur and had said dumb things like “I’m sure you’re very pretty, Foggy.”

God, Matt.

He steps onto the cold floor and shivers, wipes at his eyes. He doesn’t want to be the one night stand that cries the morning after, he wants to be the one that quietly sneaks out before he has to face his regret. He quietly approaches the door, slips around it.

The place is nice, kind of. It’s very... vintage, something that totally belonged in the 80’s with some floral couch in the middle of the room and holy shit, that TV is out of the 80’s. He thinks that if he turns it on, it won’t even have colour. It’s not his place though, and it’s kind of rude to turn on other people’s TVs. 

He’s tempted to, though. His fling doesn’t seem to be anywhere in sight, and there’s no sound to indicate that they’re in the apartment. He twists the knob to the ‘on’ notch, and wow, it is actually in colour. The channel is on a news station, grainy and hard to watch. He sits on the edge of the couch, watches the news and hopes that he won’t see ‘local blind man found dead’, but kind of hopes that he does. 

“Good morning, Hell’s Kitchen!” The newscaster says cheerfully, “It’s 8:30 on the 26th of June, 1992-”

Wait.

1992?

Man, he really needs to go back to bed.

Because if he can have a dream where he’s in 1992 and 33 years old when he’s supposed to be 13, then he can have a dream where Matt is still alive. He assumes that his fling has gone to work, so it can’t hurt if he sleeps on the couch for a second, right? 

-

He wakes up still in the 90’s apparently, and he’s pretty sure that he’s awake this time - the grief has hit harder than ever before. He’s choking, drowning maybe. It’s so- it’s so- he doesn’t even have words for it. Matt was always the one with words, and fuck, he’s lost that part of him. It’s like someone has taken his shoulder and left the wound untreated, raw, infected and festering.

It’s six in the evening, apparently to the clock on the wall. His fling isn’t back yet, and Foggy doesn’t feel like going anywhere. Maybe they have beer or something in the fridge, or vodka hidden somewhere. He could do with a bottle or three of just vodka at the moment. 

He’s in luck, fishing a bottle of shitty beer out of the fridge. It’s something he would have drunk in law school, and it’s familiar. He sits down, stares at the TV that’s playing some vaguely sexist drama that he can’t follow. He thinks that maybe, if his blind best friend just happened to be a vigilante who kicked ass, then it’s not that big of a stretch that he’s somehow travelled back in time thirty years. He has another bottle, and then three more. Being drunk, it’s somehow easier to swallow that down.

Of course, he still thinks that he’s dreaming, but it’s easier to think about being in the past than it is to think of the colour that his best friend’s lips had faded to after he had stopped breathing, to think of the way that his heart had been there one second, gone the next. If he was in the 90’s then it means that he could go get super high and become a hippie and go to discos and be super grungey. 

But drunk Foggy is still a lawyer, because logically he knows that if he’s in the 90’s then where is the future him? Just gone? Or how does 90’s him even get a job? “Hi, I’m Foggy Nelson and I graduated law school in the future, please hire me.” And how does he pay for anything? Did credit cards even exist in this time? 

He wouldn’t even have anywhere to live.

Except, drunk Foggy is helpful enough to suggest that if the owner of the apartment hasn’t come back, maybe he won’t come back at all. Drunk Lawyer Foggy argues that someone was paying rent for this place, and therefore would have to come back at sometime. After an argument with Drunk Foggy and Drunk Lawyer Foggy, he finds himself stumbling to the desk in the corner, pulling out the drawers. There’d have to be some information about the person who owned the place. He finds paperwork, and then more paperwork. He doesn’t read any of it, because he’s not exactly sure which letters are O’s and which ones are Q’s and his brain can’t figure out what ‘TQ WHQM IT MAY CQNCERN’ is supposed to mean. 

Maybe he should sleep.

So he does, on the floor, because Drunk Foggy is an asshole to hungover Foggy.

-

Hungover Foggy wakes up at 12 the next day and regrets every moment of his life leading up to this point. After a long session of regret, he pushes himself off of the floor and promptly loses the contents of his stomach. That’s cool, he thinks to himself, groaning.

After an hour or four, he finally moves from his puddle of recrimination and grossness and searches out the bathroom. The owner hasn’t been home yet, either, no sign of them. He showers and cries a little bit (a lot) and then-

“Now what am I supposed to wear?”

Foggy thinks that he’s already thrown up on their floor and had long overstayed his visit, so it couldn’t hurt to steal some clothes from whoever owned the place. He’s pleasantly surprised to find that his partner had been male and the same size as him, so he throws on some hideous tie dye shirt and sweatpants that fit disturbingly well. He then drinks about four billion litres of water and tries to clean the floor, but it’s already so stained that he really doesn’t have to work that hard.

And then he sees the files.

He’s a lawyer, so of course he sits down on the couch with them, tenderly reading each page like a new lover. Most of it is boring, no real information about the person who lives here, until he comes across a written letter. 

“Mr. Nelson, 

thank you so much for your assistance with the custody case and helping me get my boy back again. He wouldn’t have been safe with Maggie, and I’ll forever be grateful that you took my case pro bono. Will definitely be recommending you to anyone I know in a bit of legal trouble. 

Thank you again, Jack Murdock.  
01/05/1992”

Well, fucking shit.

Matt didn’t like talking much about his family, but he knows the basics. He knows that Maggie Murdock had not been the most loving mother and had disappeared off the face of the earth when Jack had died, leaving Matt to the nuns. He didn’t know there had been a custody battle, or that Matt had apparently been trapped with her.

He also didn’t know that he himself was a lawyer in the 90’s.

Huh.

Looked like he needed a lot more beer.

-

Right, it’s been six days and Foggy’s pretty sure that he’s the new owner of the apartment. He’s gone through all of the files he could find with the name Murdock and he finds pretty standard things, arguments that Maggie was mentally unfit as a mother and didn’t have the resources or the funds to care for Matt, and arguments against Jack, saying that he was a good for nothing boxer. The last one causes rage to boil in Foggy’s stomach, sitting uncomfortable like too hot soup because Matt never said much, but Jack had been the best father he could have been to Matt. 

But then the files run dry and he really knows nothing more now, except an address. Except, Foggy can’t exactly pop up and say, “Hi, I’m your son’s best friend from twenty years in the future where he just died, mind if I speak to him?”.

No, he’ll be articulate and smart about it. He’ll just act like Lawyer Nelson, calling to check up on Matt and see if everything was okay. 

-

Articulate and smart are two words that Foggy would NOT apply to the situation. 

He reminds himself for the seventy ninth time that day that he’s a lawyer, he had his own law firm and that he was working for a prestigious company now. He was good at being a lawyer. 

For some reason, repeating those words to himself don’t seem to solidify their meanings. 

Of course the Murdocks don’t have a landline phone, because Matt had implied (but never said, never complained) with mentions of stale off brand cereal for dinner, that his childhood had never really been filled with grandeur, so it’s really no surprise that there’s no number listed for them.

However, there is a home address and a place of work for Jack, so he thinks, ‘I will be astute and confident and tell this man to protect his precious child from stray chemical trucks in the streets.’. He doesn’t have to hear the words aloud to know how stupid they sound. 

But he had aimed to articulate his words, precise and calm. He thinks ‘Jack Murdock, I just wanted to check up on you and your son. No sudden cases of blindness or blind old men named Stick beating him with a stick? No sudden cases of dying in the streets? No? Okay, keep it that way.’ isn’t the best way to go.

But nor is following Jack Murdock home from a fight, which is exactly what he does, because Foggy graduated law school and became a successful lawyer, but he still has shit for brains sometimes. He tries to be subtle, but Matt must have gotten his bat-like senses way before the accident, because half a block later, Jack stops.

Golden moment. Foggy steps out from the shadows, “Mr. Murdock, I’d like to talk to you about your son.” Calm, astute, precise. He doesn’t stutter. 

And then he’s on the floor, Jack standing over him. It’s dark, but Foggy thinks that maybe he can see the flames of protectiveness in the father’s eyes. His jaw is set, a furious wave of ‘my son is mine and i will protect him’ flooding off of him - and jesus okay, that’s a look he’s seen on Matt way too many times and it’s like looking at a mirror and it hurts, he feels like he might actually cry on Jack Murdock’s shoulder and sob about how much he looks like his dead best friend. But he doesn’t. He swallows down his sadness and grief and depression and loss down like one of those horrible fitness shakes that his mother drinks (he had taken a sip once and had gagged and almost lost the entire contents of his stomach for the year because it had been so thick and disgusting and ugh)

“Wow, okay.” And the articulate part is out the window, “Sorry, I didn’t think that would make you angry. I’m Foggy Nelson, your lawyer from a few months ago. The custody case?” He asks, like anyone could ever forget almost losing the rights to their precious, only child. Foggy knows from his files that Jack Murdock lived for exactly two things; his son and boxing. “I just wanted to check up on you guys, make sure everything is alright.”

Jack’s face is suspicious. “And you did that by followin’ me home at some dumb hour?”

“Well-”

Jack is suddenly up and christ, he’s fast. Foggy takes a second to get his bearings, jumps to his feet and sprints to Jack. His heart is hammering and his head is sludgy and still feels like he’s had a bit too much to drink even though he hasn’t. He wonders if this is what grief does to people, stops them from functioning. He hasn’t really lost anyone before, except for Great Grandma Ruth when he was four and a family dog when he was sixteen. 

“Jack, can you just- can you stop and listen to me for just a second?” And wow, okay, Jack is just like Matt because he’s a stubborn asshole and speeds up his step so Foggy has to walk even faster. If they continue like this, they might actually be running. 

“Alright.” Foggy sighs melodramatically. “Fine. You want to play it the hard way, do you?” Because Foggy’s brain is fucked up at the moment (that’s what he’s blaming it on, it’s grief, alright? He’s not usually this dumb, because he’s watched hundreds of sci-fi time travel movies and he knows that the worst thing to do is expose yourself as a time traveller, but give him a break, alright?), he says “Guess you don’t want to talk to the time traveller that just watched your son die because he’s a fucking self-sacrificing idiot.” and wow that had way, way more emotion than he had been intending, but alright.

Jack gives him a sideways glance, raises his eyebrow in the ‘is this guy for real?’, and pauses his steps. “Stop talkin’.” He says after a moment. “Don’t talk to me about my son, and stay away from him. Stay away from me, too, otherwise I’ll make you think you’re from the future.” 

And wow okay, that was a little violent and more threatening than he expected, so he stops. “I’ll leave you to it then. I’m sure you have my number for when you want to chat about these things reasonably.”

Jack Murdock, does not reply.

And Foggy goes home to an apartment that isn’t his, lays on sheets that do not belong to him, and cries tears for a best friend who doesn’t even know him in this time period.

-

Foggy thinks that if he had to add another few things to his resume, they would probably be ‘dumbass who doesn’t give up’, ‘totally irrational at times’ and ‘sometimes really stupid but i’m smart i promise’. Because here he is, knocking on the Murdock door and hoping that Jack won’t try to punch his brains out.

The area is shitty, the building a disgusting, crumbling mess that could probably be put up on the stand in court for its ugliness. Inside is no better, stained carpets and flaking paint on the walls. It has a strange odour of stale air and old people, which seems foreboding and a little terrifying. 

“Jesus Christ.” Foggy has the good sense to duck this time, feeling the air above him disturbed with a forceful punch. He doesn’t need to add to the collection on his face, the one from the night before is purple and sore and hurts like a mother. “Didn’t I tell you to stay away?”

“Guess I’m not a smart one then, am I sir?”

“No.” And then the door is slammed in his face. Huh, so one thing that Matt didn’t get from his father was the rudeness, but Foggy also puts that down to being raised by nuns and a blind asshole who expected too much from a grieving, blinded child. 

He’s about to knock but-

“Dad? Who was that?”

Shit, was that Matt? Little, tiny Matt? 

“Just some charity seekers, Matty, nothin’ to worry about. Have you have breakfast yet?”

“Ye-es dad.” The doleful tone is so, so Matt that Foggy actually starts crying again. His fist is to his mouth, swallowing back the sobs. He thinks about the times that Matt had taken the tone with him (“Foggy, I’m fine, it’s just a cold.” “Yes, mom, I have eaten today.”) and thinks that he might throw up, because wow.

His Matt is dead.

That thought suckerpunches him in the chest, leaving him breathless. He stumbles away from the apartment, down the stairs away from the nine year old, not dead, version of his best friend as the sobs rip their way out of his throat with a ferocity like Daredevil’s punches. He makes his way to his apartment in a blind haze, sobbing so hard that he knows he must be getting some looks and the little old lady that he passes on the street reaches out to grab his elbow and asks if he’s okay, but he’s not because Matt is dead and she’s grabbing his elbow like Matt used to, when he was still alive and breathing and not dead, and wow, he’s falling apart. 

He can’t find it in him to reassure the old lady, because what would he say otherwise? “No, i’m not okay because i just heard the nine year old version of my dead best friend and he’s not blind yet and he hasn’t had some shitty life yet and he hasn’t grown up to get to the age of 32 to die.” He pulls out of her grasp, finds the apartment and fumbles with the lock. It takes him a good moment to just breathe enough to actually remember that the key has to go in the lock first before it can do it’s job.

Once he gets inside, he throws himself down onto the couch. He wishes to call Karen and to cry at her and with her and then eat shitty ice cream that tastes like cardboard and get roaringly drunk to forget the pain. He wants to call Claire and bond over their stupid mutual dead friend and tell her dumb stories back from law school and tell her that it wasn’t her fault.

More than anything else though, he wishes that Matt was alive.

He doesn’t get squat, though, because Karen and Claire aren’t stuck in the fucking 90’s and his Matt is still dead.

-

“Haven’t you learned your lesson yet?” Jack asks, after he catches Foggy following him home again. He seems in a better mood though - from the sounds of it, he must have won the fight - and he hasn’t tried to punch Foggy yet, so that’s a nice surprise. 

“Guess I haven’t.” 

“Mm.” Jack nods, looking lost in his thoughts. He’s tense again, though, muscles coiled as though he’s ready to fight for his son’s honour. “I don’t trust you, y’know? You seem desperate though, not sure why.” 

“I wonder why.” Foggy mutters to himself, shakes his head. “Look, I know I seem crazy and a little like I’ve seen Back to The Future,” (‘when was that released?’ Will jack even get the reference?’) a few too many times-” Jack snorts, mumbling ‘you got that right’ (and oh good, he does get the reference. It makes Foggy feel just a little tiny bit better.) “- but I’m not lying to you, Jack.” 

“You don’t think you’re lyin’. You still might be, though.” Wow, okay, that’s the shit that Foggy expects from philosophers and Drunk Foggy, not from a partially uneducated boxer, but alright. “Look, I get that you’ve got your ‘gotta save the world’ complex going on here-” (and no, Foggy really doesn’t, Matt’s the one with that complex. Foggy has the ‘gotta save Matt’ complex, but he’s sure that they’re similar on some level.) “- but Matt has seen enough shit as it is and he’s not even ten yet, so don’t get involved with him, alright?’

“Of course.”

“Now, I need you to tell me me about Matt dying. How far in the future are you from?” Okay, and Foggy is half tempted to say 80 years, let the man think that Matt died in old age and give the man piece of mind. But fuck, he needs to get this shit off his chest.”

“It’s 1992, right?” 

“Mm.”

“Then twenty-odd years, give or take.” He hears Jack hiss air in between his teeth, because yeah, thirty years old is way too young for anyone to die. No one wants to hear that their child only has twenty years left to live, because really, what could they achieve in that time if they’re not Matthew Murdock? “Yeah, I know.” 

“What happened?”

Ah, and that’s the question he was dreading. How does he say ‘your son becomes blind and then you die and he gets shipped off to an orphanage where another blind guy teaches him to become a vigilante, and then while being a blind vigilante who has literally had his chest opened up like an autopsy by some Japanese guy, he dies because he got shot by some fucking kids’ to someone’s father?

“I don’t think you want to know.” Foggy says, eventually. The words are weighted with the world, low and shaky. “I don’t think you’d believe me if I told you.”

“I deserve to know.” 

Foggy takes a breath. “Alright, Matt’s this good guy right? Like, ‘weight of the world on his shoulders, fix the world on my own’ kind, right? He-” Foggy hesitates. Does he tell the truth? Lie? Omit details? “He had a reputation of sorts, as some guy who helped people. Dismantled human trafficking rings by himself kind of bullshit. It all just caught up to him.” He wants to tell Jack about the way that Matt’s eyes had been rolling around in his head, as though he was trying to see, wants to tell him about how Matt’s hand had trapped his own in the tightest possible grip and he had felt it loosen as he died, felt the hand go limp and then cold, becoming so fragile that Foggy thought that if he applied the slightest bit of pressure, Matt would just deflate like a toothpaste tube. 

“You care about him.”

“No shit.”

There’s silence, for a moment. Foggy thinks of all of the things he could say. He could tell Jack that Matt had gone to law school because his dad had wanted to and had graduated summa cum laude. He could tell him about how polite he was, how gentle and caring and kind he was. He could also tell him how broken Matt was, because Matt was like a 100 piece puzzle missing 56 of the pieces. 

“Did you-” And wow, did Battlin’ Jack Murdock just hesitate? “Did you want to meet him one day? Not until I know that you’re not gonna kidnap him and take him to the future with you, but...”

“I would love to.” And he would, he really would, but he thinks that nine year old Matt might be a little freaked out when some adult comes over in terrible clothing choices and cries over him. “But-”

“He’s not your Matt. I know.” 

“It’s not just that. I just- I’m worried I’ll freak him out, y’know?”

“If your Matt is anything like mine, then you’re wildly wrong about him.” Jack has a sad smile on his face. “Somehow he’s the dumbest and smartest kid alive. Got high hopes for him, but he’s too kind, too understanding.” He grimaces. “From what you’re telling me, it sounds like I had better start training that out of him now.” 

Foggy chuckles, and wow, that feels really strange and foreign and wrong because Matt is dead and he shouldn’t be laughing. “He was raised by nuns for a while, so I don’t think you have much chance.” And then he realises that he’s fucked up, he’s fucked up big big big time. “I think I might just go. Things to do, you know, time travel thing-”

“What do you mean ‘raised by nuns’?” Oh, yep, okay, the reports weren’t wrong about Jack Murdock being scary because that voice terrifies him to the core and he thinks that the only other time that he’s only really been this intimidated by another person is when he met the Punisher, just casually hanging out on Matt’s couch with blood pouring out of him. 

“I think I’m going to go-”. Jack’s hand is strong and warm, wrapped around his forearm in a grip that hurts a lot. 

“Tell me.” 

“Maybe now isn’t the time.” Foggy tries to insist. “It’s getting late and it’s a long story and I’m sure Matt wants to see you before he goes to bed and tomorrow’s a school day so he has to get to bed soon, right?”  
“Nelson.”

“Alright, fine. I’ll tell you, but not here. I don’t think everyone is going to be as believing as you if they hear I’m from the future. I can’t afford to be locked up in the nineties.”

“Right.” He sounds are guarded and unimpressed as he did on the first night. 

“Tomorrow, alright? You can come over to my apartment and I’ll tell you whatever you want to know, just- just let me try to save my best friend, alright?”

It might have been the crack in his voice, it might have been the tremble in his body, it might have been the tears spilling down his cheeks, but Jack nodded.

Belatedly, Foggy realises, that it might have been that Jack Murdock is a good man.

-

“Tea? Coffee? Shit beer?” If procrastinating had been a class at college, it would have been Foggy graduating summa cum laude, not Matt. Jack has been given a short tour of the place, had Foggy ramble at him for a good five minutes. The man, at the very least, had patience. 

“No. Tell me about Matt.”

Foggy sinks down heavily on the chair, swallowing. “Like what, exactly?” He doesn’t need to ask, he knows exactly what Jack will ask. He wants to delay it though.

“You know what.”

“Right.” Foggy rubs a hand over his chin. He needs to shave, he realises. He hasn’t since he’s been to the past. “Matt lived at Saint Agnes’ orphanage from the ages 11 to 18, hence being raised by nuns. He’s so polite that sometimes I’m offended at how polite he is.”

“And why was he at Saint Agnes?”

“I think the orphanage part kind of covers that question, don’t you?” At Jack’s steely glare, he sighs. “Look, Matt didn’t tell me much because from what he’s implied, he didn’t have a great life there, alright? All I know is that Battlin’ Jack Murdock is shot dead in 1994 and Matt is left alone. Maggie Murdock wasn’t anywhere to be found when it happened and I’ve never looked into it in my time, but I’m guessing she’s dead too, or she’s locked away somewhere to deal with her mental health.” 

“1994.” Jack says softly. “That’s two years away. Tell me what happened. Tell me so I can give Matt the life he deserves.”

“You won a fight you weren’t supposed to. That’s all I know. You were all over the papers, pretty big deal in such a small place. Everyone was talking about it for months.”

Jack makes a pained sound. “So, what, I lose all of my fights in 1994? I have to make money somehow-”

“Don’t you think your son is a little more important than money?”

“Don’t you think that Matt deserves to have a roof over his head and food, rather than livin’ out on the streets and eatin’ from a dumpster?” Okay, so instead of a boxer, Jack should have been a lawyer because Foggy has no reply for that.

“There’s somethin’ you’re not telling me.” And wow, the man sees straight through him and that’s just a little tiny bit concerning.

“Alright fine, Matt is blind, alright? Happens sometime this year and I’m pretty sure it hasn’t happened yet because he said it happened in winter.” 

“Matt’s blind? How?”

“Because he’s a selfless hero. Again, he told me squat about it but he saved some old man and got hit by a truck full of chemicals or the chemicals splashed onto him or whatever. All I know is what I heard from the papers.”

“What else?”

“Uh, well. He’s a vigilante-” at Jack’s panicked look, he scrambled to correct himself, “- that’s what he called himself anyway. People thought he was a hero. He would protect Hell’s Kitchen and defend it against Japanese guys trying to do weird shit to the city and some guy called Wilson Fisk-”

“Stop.” Jack said, shaking his head. “Just, give me a second to wrap my head around this, alright?”

“Yeah, okay.” Foggy stands up, paces. He has all of this sudden energy that he has nothing to do with it. He’s a taut mess of too tired and too overworked and too mournful, energy that he shouldn’t even have coursing through him. He wants to punch something, but he won’t. 

He hasn’t really given himself time to grieve. 

He knows that on every single list of things to do when you lose someone you love, the first one is to let yourself grieve, to mourn. But he doesn’t want to grieve, because then it really means that Matt isn’t coming back because Matt is dead, Matt is a breathless corpse, a dead man waiting to get into heaven. Matt is his best friend, and he’s gone and it’s something that Foggy acknowledges but doesn’t believe. 

He keeps on expecting to wake up and have Matt sitting on his couch and going, “Hey Fog, rough night?” with that dumb fucking smirk of his. Except he won’t, because he cut ties with Matt, except he won’t, because he told Matt he wants nothing to do with him anymore.

Except he won’t, because Matt is dead.

Okay, and maybe he’s crying a little, or sobbing a lot. He doesn’t really know anymore, it doesn’t really make sense. All he knows is that he’s crying over a dead man’s dead son in front of said dead man.

When did his life get so fucked up?

Jack rises, looking a little comfortable and more than understanding, because he’s lost people before too. Or maybe he’s just learned that he’s going to lose his son, or his son is going to lose him. This time travel shit is messing with his head and he just wants to sleep, sleep, sleep. 

He realises Jack saying something in a too calm tone and leaving Foggy alone again, and he breaks down, shows the wall his anger with a shattering beer bottle. As the glass shatters, too loud, too loud, too loud, Foggy thinks that he might be shattering with it. 

-

Foggy tries to sleep a few hours after his breakdown, but his throat aches from the screaming and his eyes hurt too much to focus on anything else, so sleep eludes him like a one night stand that gave him the wrong number. 

It’s about the time that Jack would finish up at the gym or a fight, so Foggy gets up, scrubs at his face so he appears like he’s not a broken human being and meets Jack just as he’s leaving, so he thinks he times it pretty well.

“I wasn’t expecting you tonight.” Jack says, after a while. “Thought you might sleep it off or drink it away or whatever.”

He has tried, but it’s hard to drink away the thought of your best friend dying, just like it’s hard to wash his hands without seeing Matt’s blood on it. (“Out damn spot,” he thinks, every time, feeling hysterically like Lady Macbeth. He hopes that Matt’s death doesn’t drive him from jumping off of a tower but he’s not quite positive he won’t with his current mindset because he and matt were codependent assholes.)

“Thought you might have wanted to talk more. Work on mission: save Matthew Murdock and ultimately the world.” 

“Some people might say that God has chosen a path for all of us already.” Jack says quietly.

“And what do you say?”

“I think that sometimes God is not always right.” Jack says quietly. “Matt- he doesn’t deserve to die so young, and he doesn’t deserve to go live in some orphanage for several years.”

“So we’ll change the world?”

“Damn straight, we will. At least for Matt. Kid’s gone through so much shit and he’s only nine years old.”

“Cool, cool.” He doesn’t have any words at the moment, feels like someone has taken the meaning of every single one of them and leaving him with gibberish that he doesn’t understand.

Jack seems to, though, so it’s okay.

-

Three weeks later and several meetings with Jack, Foggy is starting to feel like that they can achieve this, that Matt will be a happy non-blind cinnamon roll, safe and sound for his entire life.

That is, until Matt gets hit by a fucking truck with chemicals in it and wow, Foggy was so not prepared for this. He had assumed that because they were going to save Matt, that he would be okay. 

Nope.

Matt’s on the ground screaming because he’s nine years old and he’s in agony and Jack looks like he’s never been so scared in his life and Foggy feels fucking paralysed because this is the first time he’s seen this version of his best friend and of course it’s when he’s crying and yelling and having his retinas burned out, so that’s a lovely thing for him that sends him into something that might be bordering in a panic attack so he hides out at his apartment for a week or two and has paced a whole into the carpet.

Jack Murdock storms down his door at three am, when Matt is safely asleep and there are nurses watching him. He doesn’t say a word, instead goes to the fridge and grabs the shitty beer and drinks a full bottle before he says anything.

“Looks like Mattie’s life is pretty well planned out for him, don’t you think?’

“Don’t lose hope, Jack.” Foggy says, after losing his hope two weeks ago. It feels wrong rolling off of the tongue, like the words have been mishapen to the point that they’re not even words anymore, instead just playdough that a kid squeezed too hard. “Maybe Matt was just meant to be blind; he kind of rocks at being blind in my time, so, you know. We can still make sure that he doesn’t get sent to the orphanage, or get totally fucked up by some old guy.”

So maybe Foggy’s had a bit to drink. His tongue is too loose and wow he’s saying way more than he should be, because Jack gives him that look and Foggy spills everything.

“Let me get this straight,” Jack says, after finishing his fourth beer. Foggy hopes that the man is kind enough to pay him back and then realises that the man has a blind kid who has suddenly become ten hundred times more expensive than he was before (because Foggy knows that Matt gets a disability allowance but at the end of the fortnight he’s scrabbling for cash and eating that shitty ramen that both of them hate because being blind is expensive) and feels bad. “Some old guy called Stick takes my blinded, recently orphaned son, and turns him into a warrior?”

“Yeah, that sounds right.”

The coffee table splinters, but that’s okay because Foggy thought it was kind of hideous anyway. He’s not too sure about the new decorations though - the shards of wood just seem a little too dangerous. 

“If it makes you feel any better, Stick was blind too.”

“No, it really doesn’t.”

“Me either. Blind or not, I’d trip that asshole over in the street, I don’t care who’s watching.”

“I’d do more than trip him.” Jack mutters darkly, but shakes his head. “Right. Okay. Alright, new plan, we wrap Matty up in bubblewrap and never let him go outside again.”

“I think he might not like that.”

“Yeah, I know. Kid is still independent and he’s fucking blind now. He’s charming all of the nurses and even some of the doctors. I won’t be surprised if at least three of them have asked for his hand in marriage.”

“Yeah, get used to that, it doesn’t change. Dude has a radar for hot chicks- never knew how he ever did it considering the whole blind thing, but-” Drunk Foggy has enough sense to stop talking about Matt picking up hot chicks, because wow, Jack really didn’t need to know about his nine year old son’s future sex life.

“I think I’m going to stop talking now.” It’s probably the smartest idea that Drunk Foggy’s ever had, because Jack snorts and shakes his head at him.

“No, go ahead, tell me all about my nine year old son’s sexual prowess.” And then he laughs and laughs and laughs, and it’s not the happy laugh because Foggy knows that laugh, because he’s done it more than his fair share in this time period. He leaves Jack on the couch to laugh/sob to himself and throws himself down onto his bed.

And he sleeps.

-

Jack is gone when Foggy wakes up with a hangover bigger than his head. He was expecting it, because if his nine year old child had been recently blinded, he want would to spend every moment with him too. His table is still a wreck on the floor, and he plays a careful game of hopscotch in order to not slice open his feet. His head pounds in protest, but he makes it safely to the other side of the room.

Belatedly, he realises he could have just gone around the couch and avoided the mess all together, but Foggy’s brain isn’t working too good at the moment. It hasn’t been for a few weeks, but he’ll blame that on too much beer and too much grief and maybe just a little homesickness. 

He thinks that maybe he might stop drinking so much because he’s pretty sure that he’s out of a job (because the landline has run several billion times and Foggy hasn’t bothered answering it) and he’s drinking away what little money he has. 

If he sees Jack again, he might ask to see Matt for motivation.

Only might. 

He’s not sure if he’s ready to see Matt again, and the boy’s been recently blinded; he’d be shaky and unstable and scared, and it’s really not fair for Foggy to go add to that with his stranger-ness and emotionally hurt-ness.

He maps out a plan in his head, actually, he maps out several; but none of them will help save Matt. He thinks that Jack should quit boxing, but the man doesn’t have a great education and there’s no way an ex-boxer has a chance at getting a job, so he shelves that one away. He thinks that he should just hang around for two years and maybe take a bullet for Jack and leaving Matt with a father, but that requires him to stay in the past for two years and then die. He shelves that one too.

Another one is to let Jack die and then raise Matt on his own, but the only experience Foggy has is from his family and he’s never actually raised a kid before, let alone a eleven year old who is blind and has lost his father.

He fills up the shelves with dumb fucking ideas and becomes an emotional wreck after he shelves the eighteenth one because it was too irrational and wouldn’t work.

Maybe, he thinks, three hours later on the kitchen floor, just maybe, Matthew Murdock isn’t meant to be saved.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please tell me every single one of my mistakes because I wrote this 42 page baby all in one day, and show the love. <3


	2. Part 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> so... warnings for terminal illness, death and vague implications of suicide, also foggy's irrational actions when he's grieving.

“Matty,” Jack says softly, touching his son’s hand gently. “I want you to meet a friend of mine. His name is Foggy and he’s a good man.”

“Foggy? Like the weather?”

Jack huffs out a soft laugh and replies because Foggy can’t fucking breathe. “Yeah, Matty. Just like the weather.”

Nine year old, recently blinded Matt, is just as sweet and kind and thirty two year old, long time blinded Matt, and Foggy wants to scream and yell at how unfair the world is. 

But he doesn’t.

Instead he talks to Matt, acts like one of Jack’s buddies from boxing or whatever, and learns way more from nine year old Matt about his life than he did adult Matt. (That makes him angry, because now he knows that his secrecy is not developed genetically from his dad, but from mistrust or from Stick. Maybe both. Either way, he wants to give this blind asshole a piece of his mind.)

After Foggy leaves, he goes home and plans again. He’s going to save this fucking kid no matter what.

Jack drops in around midnight, looks at the sheets of paper surrounding Foggy and sighs. It’s like he’s familiar with the task, probably because he’s done it too. Strange how they both suddenly dedicate their lives to saving someone who has another twenty odd years left to live.

“He knows that you’re not a boxing buddy.”

“Big surprise. He’s smart.” 

“Yeah. Got big hopes for him- but you already know that, right?”

“He may have mentioned it once or twice. He liked to think that you’d be proud of him. You would be, I think.”

“I’m always proud of him.” And shit that hurts, because Matt was uncertain, always saying that he thought that maybe his dad would be proud of him, not that he knew. He wonders if it’s just a Matt thing, or if it’s because of some blind old dude who treated him like shit. He wants to say both. 

“He graduated law school, top of the class.” Foggy says because he has nothing else to say. “We were both offered internships and Landman and Zach and we took it. Few weeks later and Matt was already unhappy because he wasn’t helping the world the way he wanted to.”

“Yeah? I’m not surprised.”

“Yeah. We, uh, we started our own law firm together, Nelson and Murdock, and we took pro bono cases and helped those who needed the help. Got us in a bit of danger sometimes, especially when we got gang members put in jail, but it was worth seeing the difference”

“You guys did good.” 

“We did.”

“I’m sensin’ a ‘but’.”

“But then I found out that Matt was Daredevil, and then it all kind of went downhill from there. We lasted for a little while after that and then it was-” he hesitates, because he could totally just spill and say everything about Elektra and how she fucked Matt up in college and how she almost did it again, but he doesn’t. “He got too involved in being Daredevil and it was really just Nelson and Nelson. Karen - our secretary -, uh she and Matt were dating for a little while and then there was a misunderstanding and then, we just kind of fell apart. I got a new job, Karen got a new job, and Matt was just Daredevil.”

“What else?” The man was like a shark, too smart and once he had caught a blood trail he wouldn’t let off. 

“You’ll be pissed off with me.”

“Then don’t tell me.”

“I cut ties with him.” He says anyway because he’s got to get this shit off his chest, to express his guilt and frustration and anger and-. “So did Karen, I think. I don’t really know what really happened in between our law firm falling apart and him...” he can’t say the words to Matt’s father, because it feels so, so wrong. “I found out that a significant person in his life died and I wasn’t there to support him for it. Kind of fitting that a significant person in my life died, and he’s not around to support me.” 

“He’s still around in this timeline.” Jack says, after a while. “We still have time to save him.”

It’s more reassuring when someone else says it.

-

Foggy hangs around at the Murdock apartment when Matt gets released from hospital and the three of them hang around and they watch movie (with audio description from the two people who can actually see), and Foggy takes care of Matt when Jack has a fight at night, and it’s almost like one perfect little family.

Except Matt has migraines, and nine year old Matt is not as good as hiding his feelings as law school Matt was. It starts with a furrow in his brow, tensing of his jaw. Jack looks unsettled when he leaves, soothing a hand over Matt’s head and telling Foggy to make sure he gets dinner and goes to bed at a decent time.

He can do that.

Except when he’s finished making the famous Nelson Mac’n’Cheese, he finds Matt curled up in his bed, hands clasped over his ears and tears on his face. He gives the kid painkillers and tries to coax him into eating but he’s so out of it, delirious and sometimes shouting in pain. Sometimes the shouts don’t make sense, other times, Matt is calm enough to tell Foggy about the teenaged girl who just got mugged a block away or the thief that just tried to break into someone’s apartment.

Christ, if he knew Matt heard things like that on a daily basis, maybe he would have been more open to the idea of Daredevil, because it’s torture for Foggy to get a second hand version of what's happening. He wants to go out and help these people but he can’t because he’s powerless and weak and he’s trying to look after this kid.

By the end of the night, when Jack returns, Foggy knows it’s inevitable to stop Matt from becoming Daredevil. 

He wants to give up hope.

But he doesn’t.

For Matt.

-

He tells Jack this when they next meet up and Matt is asleep upstairs, sleeping off another migraine. 

“Matty is always going to try to help someone, Foggy.” Jack tells him, sounding exhausted. “He saved an old man who he didn’t even know and became blind. I’m pretty sure this is just representative of the shit that he’ll do later on in life.”

“So what’s the point? How do we stop it?”  
“I don’t think we can.”

The words are unspoken, but Foggy knows that Jack is silently saying ‘maybe we should just let god take control here and let matt’s life go the way it’s supposed to go’. Neither of them say that they know the meaning though.

They’ll keep on fighting for this dumb kid that means everything to the both of them, even if neither of them believes that he can be saved.

But they’ll keep fighting.

Because it’s Matt.

-

In law school, when Foggy had still been naive and young and a little bit high, he had asked “Matt, do you love yourself as much as I love you?” It had been random but hey, Foggy had been high and stressed and so, so overworked to the point that he didn’t understand half of the words that he was typing, so sue him. (Do it, he has a law degree, he’ll take you down.)

And Matt’s hand had paused over the braille textbook. “Uh, I don’t think anyone could have as much love as you, Fog.”

And high, naive and tired Foggy had taken that as an acceptable answer and normal Foggy had never bother to ask because it just seemed to personal and weird, even for how codependent they were. Matt didn’t like feelings talks, and Foggy didn’t like the wounded, trapped animal look that Matt would get every time he initiated, so he never really bothered unless it was important.

Now that Matt is gone and Foggy is alone in the world, he thinks that maybe he should have initiated them more, forced Matt to cry out his feelings and then be there with ice cream and personal audio description for lame movies. 

Maybe if he had initiated one talking about how fucking irresponsible and self sacrificing and dumb Matt was, he wouldn’t have died. Maybe if he had told Matt that yeah, those people out there matter, but he matters too and it’d be nice to have him alive, then he wouldn’t have died.

Maybe if Foggy had reminded Matt that he had so, so many people to love him and to support him, he wouldn’t have died.

Instead, Foggy had cut all ties with him and had ignored his calls.

He’s beginning to think it’s his fault that Matt’s dead.

And that rolls around in his stomach like a bowling ball, uncomfortable and heavy and painful and he thinks he might break under the strain. Maybe Foggy should go find ten year old Foggy and tell him to protect this dumb blind kid with a hero complex and make sure he never goes a day without feeling loved.

But he doesn’t.

Because, maybe, just maybe, that he isn’t the right person to save Matt.

-

A month passes and then another and then all of a sudden it becomes 1993 and Matt is one year closer to losing his father and Foggy is still out of ideas. Every one of his plans end like the last, none of them ever have a solid concrete foundation. As the year passes, Foggy can almost see Matt dying. 

“You’re stressed.” Jack tells him one night, leaving Matt in the safe and gentle and loving care of Josie (who is twenty years younger and still just as bitter.), and takes him to the gym. Fogwell’s (an establishment that he knows that Matt used to go to), is empty when they arrive, and Jack teaches Foggy the appropriate way to wrap his hands and then holds the punching bag while Foggy takes out his rage.

His punches are sloppy and angry, all force and no skill, because he can’t save Matt. Because no matter what he’ll do, Matt will still die. Matt is still going to die underneath Foggy’s hand, still going to fade away and leave nothing but a corpse and broken friends, and there is nothing Foggy can do to stop it.

Afterwards, Jack sits down and passes a bottle of water to Foggy. He breathes out a heavy sigh, leans back against the wall. “I know what you’re thinking.”

“Mm.”

“You’re thinking that we’ll fail anyway. You’re thinking that I’ll die next year and then Matt will die at the age of 32, and maybe you’ll get stuck in the past again, like this never ending loop.”

“Wow, I thought you were a boxer, not a philosophical mind reader.” 

Jack huffs out a laugh that is not a laugh at all. “I’m scared for him. But I’m determined not to die next year.”

“Watch out for guns.” Foggy mutters, but his heart isn’t in it.

“I was thinking,” He says, and then pauses. After a long moment, he continues. “You’re good with him.”

The implication does not need to be said.

“I’m not father material.”

“And you think this Stick guy is? You think I was ready to be a father to this kid? You already know him Foggy. So, just- take care of him when I die. If I die.”

“Jack-”

“Please, Foggy.”

“I can’t be my best friend’s father.”

“And I’m not asking you to be. I’m asking you to be there and to take care of him and to keep him in a loving home, not in an orphanage. Not with this blind guy who teaches him to be a ninja or whatever the fuck ever.”

“I-”

“Say yes, Foggy.”

“Okay.”

-

1994 creeps closer and closer, and Foggy’s heart is uncomfortable in his chest. He watches Matt get more and more confident every day - he knows the apartment by heart by now and he doesn’t need the cane and he can read braille now, so things are looking up.

Both Foggy and Jack ignore the oncoming year of 1994 and they take Matt out for ice cream and to the park and Foggy gets to know this brilliant, amazing kid, who is only missing 12 pieces out of 100. 

And then one day Matt trips and hits his head and wow both Foggy and Jack reach instant stages of panic because head injuries plus being blind isn’t a good combination, but Matt laughs them off and waves them away.

And then when Foggy unthinkingly says “how many fingers am I holding up?” there’s a moment of silence and bated breath until Matt rolls his eyes and says, “three, you asshole.”

Neither of them yell at him for his language because they’re too busy laughing. Foggy will say that he laughed so hard that he cried, but in reality, it’s because he sees more and more of his Matt every day and wow, it hurts way, way more than he expected it to. 

He thinks a lot about the upcoming year and what it’ll mean for Matt and what it’ll mean for him and Jack. He demands that Jack tells him about every fight he has, who it’s with, in the hopes that maybe he’ll recognise a name and tell Jack not to fight that night and just stay home because it’s better to be recognised as a coward than it is to leave your blind son alone and dooming him to die at 32 due to bullet wounds.

Matt reads and reads and goes to church and is overall a snarky little asshole that old ladies love and every one in the church finds it their life mission to tell Jack (and sometimes Foggy) how polite and well raised Matt was and that he was going to grow up to be a handsome young man who does some good in the world. Jack says thank you. Foggy wants to say that they’re right.

1993 passes quickly enough and Matt goes back to school and makes a friend named Darcy and studies and becomes the top of his class and then it’s 1994 and Foggy feels a permanent feeling of nausea. He stays at the Murdock apartment far more than his own and bonds with young Matt who is now almost eleven and too smart and perceptive for his own good. He bonds with Jack, as well.

The man is a lot like Matt in a lot of ways, more dry humour and sarcastic remarks rather than the wittiness he was used to, but he forms a relationship with the man and finds himself genuinely sad at the idea of him dying. He helps stitch up wound and disinfect cut knuckles and looks after Matt after a fight that knocks Jack off his feet, and he begins to think that maybe he belongs in this family.

And then one night when Matt is asleep and Jack is a few bottles deep in beer, he says; “they’re offerin’ to pay me off to lose a fight with Creel.”

Creel.

Wow, that name seems way too familiar and Foggy’s chest twists uncomfortably like someone has just poured boiling water down his esophagus. “I don’t think you should do it.”

“It’s a lot of money, Foggy. If I win, we can move out of this shitty apartment and somewhere that is better for Matt. It’ll be enough for us to live on for years.”

“Jack.” Foggy is quiet. He doesn’t want to risk Matt waking up and overhearing. “I think- I don’t think it’s safe for you. For Matt.” 

“Alright.” Jack nods, face twisting with a grimace. “I won’t do it.” He takes a long swig of his drink, and sets it down on the table. It says more than that needs to be said.

-

Two days pass after the day that the fight was supposed to happen, Jack is still alive, and Foggy is hit with so, so much relief because now it means that Matt won’t meet Stick, right? Means that he won’t be shipped off to the orphanage and won’t be loaded up with bullet holes at the age of 32. It means that he won’t be Daredevil.

He is ridiculously, insanely happy.

A week later, Foggy goes over and Matt says “Dad’s sick”.

He’s met with a feverish Battlin’ Jack Murdock who is knocked down with the flu and can’t get up, and it’s pityingly adorable how his glares look when he’s too feverish to do it properly. After almost a week of looking after him and Matt and himself, he drags Jack to a doctor so he can just get some antibiotics and sleep it off so Foggy can go home and actually sleep.

Instead, Jack is sent for blood tests.

Instead of a flu diagnosis, Jack comes home from his latest appointment, a brooding, sulky mess. He says that nothing is wrong and goes to bed. Foggy tries to distract Matt, describes movies to him and asks for his help with dinner and then they play monopoly until it’s Matt’s bedtime.

An hour after he’s sent Matt to bed, he silently creeps into Jack’s room. The man is awake, but is staring up at the ceiling. His eyes are glassy and puffy, as though he’s been crying (and that’s probably why Matt had looked so disturbed and distressed earlier- Foggy had been dreading another migraine.) 

“Jack, what’s going on?”

Foggy expected the worst, but he expects it gently and not straight up in his face, but Jack Murdock is forward. He doesn’t fuck around. “I’m dyin’, Fog.”

“Shit.”

Wow, because Matthew Murdock just CANNOT possibly have a good way, no matter what forces are at play. Because Jack will still die and Foggy will be hopeless because he’ll be grieving his best friend and his best friend’s dad, and Matt won’t be considered in good hands and then he’ll be sent off to Saint Agnes and then to Stick.

No matter what plan Foggy has, it never goes right.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought. Doc said it’s terminal, ain’t no point doing treatment that we can’t afford. Suspects I’ll be dead by the end of the mid-year.”

Mid year.

Four months away.

He had four months to prepare Matt for his father’s death and get him into good hands - maybe someone is looking for a disabled, emotionally unstable boy to adopt. 

He has four months to prepare himself to lose yet another Murdock.

“But- Matt-” He doesn’t know how to form words. He’s seen his best friend die, but it was within a matter of a minutes. He had been given half an hour with Matt, and he had believed that he would live until he had been abruptly ripped away from him. For some reasons, four months to say goodbye to Jack seems so, so much more terrifying.

“I know.” 

And Foggy feels as though the foundation of his world is shifting, shaking. He’s been caught in bomb explosions before, and it couldn’t compare to the pain he feels. He tries not to sob, tries not to make it harder on Jack, because Jack’s the dying man here. Jack’s the one that’s dooming his son to a life of pain and an early death.

But he does sob, and Jack doesn’t judge him for it. 

But Matt, Christ, this kid is too intuitive because five minutes later he’s in the room, demanding to know what was wrong. Foggy goes to lie, to tell Matt that everything is fine and it’ll be okay. 

Jack is first to speak and he doesn’t lie to Matt because he deserves nothing but the truth. He is gentler though, than he was with Foggy. He explains it calmly and wraps his arms around Matt when he starts to sob and after a moment, with tears running down his own face, he opens one of his arms up to Foggy.

And Foggy accepts.

It’s almost like an official invitation to join their family.

-

Jack get sicker and sicker and thinner and thinner and Matt gets sad and sadder and doesn’t feel like eating. He stops going to school, tells Foggy and Jack that there are more important things for him to do than learn shit he already knows.

Jack doesn’t want the kid around to watch him fall apart and get sicker each day, doesn’t want the kid to see him take painkillers because it hurts so bad and then throw up everything he’s had to eat that day, but Matt was born a lawyer and argues his way out of school, says that he can get Darcy to catch him up.

No one argues with his logic.

It’s late April and Jack has two months left to live, apparently. Foggy’s heart hurts, a lot. Matt seems more solemn every day because sometimes Jack is not always lucid. Sometimes, he is delirious and screams for people neither of them have ever heard of and tries to fight. 

Foggy feels as though he might be dying alongside Jack.

“Grief,” Karen had said after a night after too much drinking, “is worse than sickness, because it’s in your head but it sits so bone-deep like a chronic illness. It doesn’t really ever go away, either, I don’t think. It still hurts, sometimes. All the time.”

Matt was dead, and Foggy hurts - it’s been two years, and Foggy still hurts.

And now Jack was dying, and Foggy hurts.

There’s only so much hurt a man is capable of, and Foggy thinks he might be close to his limit. Thinks that maybe he might die after Jack does, so he starts planning. He talks with people who he had contacts for when he was a lawyer and being self sufficient and not living off of money that he just has for no reason, and he thinks that he might find the perfect match for Matt. They’re an elderly couple who have already had kids and grandkids and they’re just looking to have another kid to join their household to give it some life. 

So Foggy does an interview with them and they are the kindest people he’s ever met, they’re catholic, which is a good match for Matt. The man doesn’t seem like he could be Stick and seems like the sweetest peach off the tree, because they don’t react with pity when he says “Matt’s blind, but he’s smart and he’s a good kid”, they just understand.

Their names are Beverly and Theodore and Foggy tells them he’ll be in touch.

And then after meeting them, he throws up in some back alley because yeah, maybe they’re wonderful but he had promised Jack that he would look after Matt and make sure he was safe and raise him right. He rolls the guilt around in his mouth, can’t decide if it’s better to ship Matt off to a stable couple who will raise him right, or if he should just keep Matt to himself.

But they’ll be grieving. They’ll both be grieving.

Matt doesn’t need that in his life.

-

“I need you to tell me that it’s okay.” Foggy begs, tears streaming down his face, in one of Jack’s lucid moments. Matt has a migraine and is upstairs whimpering loud enough to be heard from here but he says that he just wants to be left alone so Foggy leaves him alone and then realises that he should never leave a child in physical and emotional pain by themselves.

Beverly and Theodore would know what to do.

“I can’t look after him after you’re gone, Jack. I’m not- This isn’t the way it’s supposed to be! God, you fucking asshole, how you get sick and fucking start dying,” yelling at a dying man for dying is perhaps, not Foggy’s finest moment, “I can’t do this alone. I’m going to fuck him up even more and then- FUCK!” He wants to drive his fist into the wall, wants to make it crumble around his anger. 

“Foggy.” Jack snaps. “Do what you think is right.”

But Foggy doesn’t know what is right. He’s not a parent. He can’t replace Jack and even after two years he’s still fucking unsure about what do sometimes, not sure what to do in situations that Jack takes care of ease. He’s not ready to be a foster father to the eleven year old version of his best friend.

And then-

Fuck, Foggy doesn’t think about them because it makes his brain hurt, but the paradoxes. What if Matt goes ahead and goes to law school and then meets the Foggy that actually belongs to this time? He doesn’t even want to know what would happen, doesn’t even want to know if a Foggy exists in this timeline or if he fucked his family up by accidentally traveling to the past.

“I need you to forgive me,” Foggy says slowly, once he’s calmed down. “I need you to tell me that I’m doing the right thing, and that I’m not going to fuck everything up.”

“No one ever knows what the right thing is until it’s done, Fog.” 

And that doesn’t fucking help.

“I don’t know what to do, Jack. If I want to go with this couple, I have to confirm it soon and get the paperwork processed as fast as I can so everything is ready by the time-.”

“Why are you talking to me about this?”

“Because you’re his father?” 

“Don’t you think Matt knows better than the rest of us what’s best for him?”

And god fucking damn it, he’s right.

-  
“Matt, we need to talk.” Wow, Foggy did not mean to make it sound like a break up speech, but that’s basically what it was right? ‘It’s not you, it’s me and i’m too fucking emotionally ruined to look after you. How do you feel about moving in with some old couple?’

“What’s up?”

“I-”

“If this about what you and dad were talking about the other night-” This fucking kid. This is the kid that graduates and becomes one of the greatest lawyers in Hell’s Kitchen, so he really, really shouldn’t be surprised. “- if it makes you happy, Foggy, then I’ll go to this new home. As long as I still get to see you.”

But it won’t make me happy, Matty, Foggy thinks. He might throw up again.

“What do you want to do, Matt?”

“I want my dad not to die so I don’t have to have this conversation.”

That makes two of them.

“Matt?”

“I don’t want to burden you, Foggy. You’ve still got to get married and have kids of your own one day and be a cool lawyer in Hell’s kitchen.” It’s as close as a ‘I’ll be adopted by this old couple’ he’ll get. 

“Did you want to meet them? See if they’re right for you?” This feels so fucking wrong, like he’s talking about shoes or a new couch or vacuum cleaners. He wants to say. ‘Matt, I will love you and protect you and keep you safe for your entire life so you don’t die in your best friend’s arms prematurely.’ He doesn’t though, because he’s a fucking idiot.

“No.” Matt says, shakes his head. “If I do, I’ll find something wrong with them and then I won’t want to go to them because they’re not my dad. I trust your judgement.”

Matt really fucking shouldn’t, because Foggy has proven at least four hundred times over the last few years that he is not a good role model, but Matt is just about to lose his father and he doesn’t deserve to have this burden on his shoulders. 

“I promise we’ll see each other still, Matt.”

It’s a lie.

-

As June approaches and Jack gets sicker, Foggy feels as though he might actually be dying because he’s never been so depressed in his life. He’s gotten the paperwork sent through and now it’s being finalised and in a few weeks Matt will have a new family and Jack Murdock will be dead and Foggy-

Foggy thinks that maybe the past is better without him in it.

It’s one of those days where they’re all curled up on the lounge that is not big enough for all three of them, but they make it work. They watch Back to The Future because Jack had wanted to, with this weird smirk on his face. And then they watch other shitty movies that none of them pay attention to. Matt falls asleep, leaning on Jack, and Jack looks close behind him.

“Fog.” He says quietly, “promise me that you won’t leave him completely alone when I’m gone.” 

Jack is fast approaching his dead, all of his toned muscles are gone and he’s skinnier and paler than he’s ever been. Foggy’s kind of glad that Matt can’t see the difference, can’t see how gaunt and deathly his father looks. 

“Sure thing.”

It’s another lie.

Foggy’s getting good at them now.

And then Jack goes to sleep and then never wakes up, and had Foggy known that the last thing he ever said to one of his friends was a lie, he might have not lied. 

But he lied.

And Jack was dead.

And Matt was crying and screaming and begging because he had woken up the moment Jack’s heartbeat had just failed. 

But Jack doesn’t wake up.

Because Jack is dead.

-

The movies lie when they say that funerals happen on rainy days, because Jack’s funeral is on a beautifully sunny day. Had it been any other day, Foggy might be sighing into the the sun and telling everyone that it was a lovely day.

But, no. Today was Jack’s funeral and maybe it was Foggy’s last day in the past. Today is not a day of celebration.

It’s a day to remind him of his failure.

(Logically, he knows that he’s saved Matt from his shitty life and he will live past thirty two and everything will be okay, but he still feels like he’s failed him.)

The funeral is small and short, simple but catholic. It’s everything that Jack had wanted. It’s over soon enough, and Foggy doesn’t cry. He doesn’t cry when Matt is too stoic and too young and too fucking Matt, no matter how much he wants to.

He doesn’t cry when the coffin goes in the ground.

He doesn’t cry when the dirt covers his friend.

He doesn’t cry when he leaves Matt and his new family at the graveyard, doesn’t cry when he finally hears Matt break down and sob at how unfair the world is and screams for his dad to come back. 

He cries when he realises that the last words he will ever hear from his best friend is ‘No, please come back, it’s not fair.’

When Foggy is looking at the clock in the apartment, counting down the minutes until he leaves the past and the future behind him, he cries.

He thinks about Jack and how much pain the man had been in, and he thinks of Matt with his new family that were entirely too nice and understanding and not Foggy. He thinks he might regret it, for just a moment. He wonders if he can kidnap him, steal him back.

But no, he has to leave. The past wasn’t made to have him.

And even if there was a way back to the future for him, he wasn’t made for it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> :)

**Author's Note:**

> Please tell me every single one of my mistakes because I wrote this 42 page baby all in one day, and show the love. <3


End file.
